You have stumbled on of my major topics. If you thought you had seen me go before when debating religion or another big topic, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

I would gladly agree to live the rest of my life as Piers Morgan’s personal gimp if he promised me there would not be a television in my cage.

Television is probably one of the biggest most evil piles of shit on the face of the earth, and I would argue that it probably does more harm than anything else on this planet. It is the number one reason for everything that is wrong in the world in my opinion.

If you turned off all the TV sets, there is no way you would get people to go along with half of the shit that they gladly let happen every day at the moment.

It is the devil, and it has lots of little symbiotic demons that help it out. Unlike the Internet it has no interaction or requirement for thought, you just sit there, and let it spoon feed you, and the spoon is usually in the hands of some asshole with an agenda, and the spoon is normally loaded up with E coli infected turds for you to much on.

Before I get started, I just want to try on for size the fallacy of trying to support my claims, by pointing out that I never became a TV basher, until I stopped watching the stuff. I don’t watch TV, but I never had a problem with it until I cut the feeding tube.

Anyway, enough with jokes and being vague, let me try to build my case here for a moment.

Television is bad because it dictates what your culture is. There is no way the 90’s would have seen so much denim, without all the constant Levis and 501 commercials, with MTV plugging the song Space Man every 15 minutes. This on its own is not a bad thing, but TV does this with so many things, that it has a major hold on the culture of any given country.

Sure, having ’‘Distant Viewing’’ entertainment in your country, and having that be part of your culture is not a problem, but what happens is television trades your culture, and sells and buys culture with other places.

You see a show like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire spring up, and if it is a success, they will franchise it, and before long you have Spanish people watching it under the name of ’‘Quien Quiere Ser Un Millonario’’ on their TV sets.

Now, is there a problem with cultures sharing things and being multi cultural? No, not at all, but that is not what this is. If you look at the UK, American or Spanish version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, you will see they have identical stage decorations, none of it is original, it is just a like for like clone after clone after clone, with the same sound effects and everything, a word for word clone.

The entire world shifts towards an exact model, eliminating any creativity or original ideas, and the worst part is, they don’t just do this with one show, they do it with practically everything. They even do this with commercials for things like Arial washing liquid, and other products.

On the Spanish TV, they have an Arial commercial, that has the same camera angle, same words, same joke, same type of set, and same kind of actors, identical in absolutely everything, to the British Arial commercial. The only difference, is that one set of actors are Spanish and in Spain, while the others are British and in the UK, they just grabbed it, packed it, and shipped it off to plug more washing liquid for even more profit.

What happens? not only do we trade our Who Wants To Be A Millionaire culture, until the TV has caused real life people to see the same thing and have the same experience, but the fiction that is television has how also had the very real effect of making these people all use the same Arial washing liquid, buying trust, as a recognized brand.

This goes on and on and on, with everything, over and over again every single day, 24 hours a day, on 800 plus HD channels.

The end result of this, is places like Bhutan, where the culture is that the happier you are the richer you are, aka the happiest place on Earth, is now turning in to another denim rock and roll and motorbikes place, since the very recent introduction of Television in to their country.

You get companies like Coca Cola, advertising until there is such a massive supply of the stuff in the world, that they end up going to Africa, to very poor areas, to buy up all their water reserves, so they can then turn it in to lovely Diabetes inducing Cola, all the time forbidding the locals from drinking the water, because they own that water. In some areas of Africa where there is not much water, it is now cheaper for them to drink Coca Cola than it is for them to get clean drinking water.

So on top of stealing and programing your culture, it helps lead to things that cause very serious real world harm. Worst of all, this is just a tiny part of the damage Television does.

TV is also a breeding ground for misery and depression, and it must be affecting the minds of the viewers to some extent.

You have shows, like the British ’‘East Enders’’ soap, that if you watch it and pay attention, will be able to see how it has a very obvious misery cycle to the formula. They start their actors off as a character with a shit life, and they slowly build them up, letting them think life is going to be better, before taking it all back away from them. Like some kind of sick Pavlovian training to make them associate hope with certain doom and misery, and they loop the actor through the misery and hope cycle over and over again.

The same is true for most other soaps, they have a large group of actors, all of them on the cycle of hope and misery at different points in the cycle, with some who are up and some who are down.

There are also loads of other shows that are not soaps that also do the same thing, and sitting down, and watching this stuff must be having an effect of some kind on the minds of those who watch it.

On top of this misery and depression in fiction, you also find it in the scary-scary news broadcasts, about the war and the plagues and the flesh eating bees or whatever it is this week that is coming to kill us all.

Lets say you don’t watch much TV, lets say you are only watching it 5 days of the week, for 1 hour a day of entertainment after work, and 30 minutes to catch up for the news. You sit there, and see the dramatic doom on the so called true and real TV on the news, and then have it reinforced with fiction that is just as miserable and full of doom and violence. That, on some kind of level, after say 20 or 30 years of that, it has to do something to you, and I can’t imagine it would be something good.

So far, I have talked about 2 points, how it affects culture, and how it affects the mind, I could go on and talk about at least another 100 points, but I will cut it off to not over-post.

I will finish by saying, that there is no formal conspiracy to program peoples minds with television, and make them do what you want them to do, and television is not some kind of government conspiracy plant to manipulate us and make us stupid and scared, however, I would argue that this is indeed the effect that is has.

Out of all the people that have stopped watching TV, I never heard any of them complain that they miss it, some have no comment to make, but most of them tell me they are happier because of it.

EDIT:

TV is not all bad, but even that is bad, just like drugs have a good enjoyable side to them, television has its good enjoyable side too, thus increasing the chance that you will go back to it, and put up with the bad for the enjoyment.

Parental permissiveness is the #1 Devil, I think. TV is bringing up the rear. When kids’ Christmas gifts start at $100 something is terribly wrong and tv encourages it. If it’s wrong it’s ok or cool; if it’s right it’s out of touch.

I didn’t read @poisonedantidote reply originally because of how long it was!
I learn so much from watching television every day.
It depends what you watch.
I love BBC documetarys like Natural World and Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Universe.
In fact, most documetarys are fascinating, and you always take something away from them afterwards.
And there is nothing wrong with the odd tv series for entertainment.
You can use TV to melt your brain and also to stimulate it.
And as long as you don’t sit in front of the TV all day long I think it can be quite a healthy pastime providing what you watch.